So....let's back up a bit. Around October (2014)I was itching in the worst way to get out of our 100 yr old 'quirky' house. I LOVED being in the country with my favorite Amish bulk foods store around the corner, hearing the clippety-clop of horses all day and night, having the space for a big garden without sacrificing space for the kiddos to run and play, being able to ride bikes to the library or park around various corners, and on... But if you'll notice, none of those lovely perks have to do with the place we live and sleep. Those wonderful pluses came at a price and that was our abode. Remember this?
That's the 'natural' color of our water (our whites weren't so white any longer). We pretended we were pioneers bathing in the river each time we wanted to cleanse our bodies, but chose not to drink from the well via the kitchen faucet...
Instead we filled 18-21 gallons of water every week and a half at the 'water store' down the road. It gave me a new appreciation for women in Africa.
And let's not forget the resident wildlife...those Carpenter ants are 1-2 inches in length and were the cause of the prettiest tree giving up its blossoms permanently...we wondered what they might be doing to the house and further ruminated that perhaps they likely contributed to the 12+ mice getting into the house. Eww gross. Nothing makes you feel dirtier than having ants and mice in your kitchen. Oh, and if your kitchen has 100 year old tile on the counters that look like the food from those past years is permanently stuck in the grout, that doesn't help either. Triple ewww.
But who's complaining? Oh, wait, that would be me (and actually, I decided to spare you the other issues--it's only fun to read others' whinings for so long :).
So. I was uber ready to move. I started looking in May at house after endless-seeming house, but the combination of our desired cost and location made it super uber-doober difficult. At the end of the summer I felt like I should try posting a 'wanted' ad on Craigslist, listing our desired wants/needs along with our finest qualities as renters. I received a few calls, but the one that made me thrilled beyond belief was a guy who had a mini farm who said he wanted to buy another house so he needed some high-quality renters. We went to take a look and I was sold the instant we drove into the long driveway...fruit trees and horses off to the right, the enormous barn in the back by the goat pen and the insulated chicken house and elderberry bushes/herb garden off to the left. And that was just outside! The inside was lovely as well, but really, a mini farm (he said we could keep the chickens and even the goats to see if we really wanted to purchase some of our own!)? Oh, and he'd throw in a baby grand piano on loan since they had two and he didn't want to move both...and this was all within our budget? whaaa??? The only catch was that we had to wait until December when they would be ready to move out. No problem. I'd been living in 'houses of character' for the last 5.5 years, I could harness my impatience little longer. Sadly, a few weeks later he called to tell us that the house he wanted to buy fell through so he could no longer offer the house to rent to us. They asked us to stay in touch because by then, we were friends (he even offered to help us move with his fork lift and tractor if we found another house to rent!). I tried really hard not to be crushed, but oh, I wanted it soo bad...
About the same time a wonderful lady called and said she wanted us to come look at her house because she thought we'd be a great fit. It was in a subdivision, so the yard was small, but the house was just incredible. Well-kept, almost double the size of what we were currently in, tons of basement storage, in our same fabulous ward, and yes, they were willing to come down a couple hundred dollars from their mortgage price to meet our maximum that we could rent for. Again, my dream of a beautiful new house was within my grasp and I was ecstatic yet again. Since our contract had expired a few months before I let the landlord know we'd be moving out in a few weeks' time. His response shocked me. He didn't want us to move out--especially so close to winter--he offered to reduce our rent by $200 each month for the next 4 months! This alone probably wouldn't have shaken my resolve, but see, Tony and I had been feeling that we should really beef up our food storage (at the time we would have been lucky to have about 3 months of meals, and most would have been some variation of 'wheat something-or-other'). We had prayed specifically that if it was right for us to do so that there would some way financially that we could do it. I got off the phone after the landlord's offer and was like, "no, way Tony, really? really?! Is this our answer?!!" He just smiled, his eyes saying, 'no-brainer dear', but he let me fight myself (smart boy) until my righteous shoulder angel won out and I let another dream house go...
Fast forward until about February and through a whirlwind of events Tony was hired by a company in Utah and our bigger dream of heading back west 'some day' was realized in a matter of weeks. If we had been in either of those houses it would have been much more complicated to accept that job--and we would have been moving twice in a matter of months (and oh, I found out I was pregnant :). Sometimes we trade one dream for another in the name of faith only to later realize that God's hand was in it all.
After saying good-bye to our 'family' of six years and a place we love, off we went to Pleasant Grove................
